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China is willing to help broker a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, sources have said just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected in Washington for a bilateral summit. Multiple people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post that Beijing was stepping up to play an “active” and “constructive” role in reviving US-...
China is willing to help broker a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, sources have said just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected in Washington for a bilateral summit. Multiple people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post that Beijing was stepping up to play an “active” and “constructive” role in reviving US-...
China is willing to help broker a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, sources have said just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected in Washington for a bilateral summit. Multiple people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post that Beijing was stepping up to play an “active” and “constructive” role in reviving US-...
China is willing to help broker a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, sources have said just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected in Washington for a bilateral summit. Multiple people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post that Beijing was stepping up to play an “active” and “constructive” role in reviving US-...
The Trump administration sanctioned Chinese-language marketplace Xinbi Guarantee on Wednesday, along with two affiliated organisations, as part of a wider crackdown on transnational cybercrime. The US Department of Justice also announced it had seized Telegram channels and cryptocurrency wallets tied to the platform, which has over 650,000 users, freezing more than US$52 million in potentially lau...
Greg Reverdiau, an Arizona-based drone trainer, said he saw something highly unusual for politically polarised America when he waded through public comments on a US government proposal to restrict foreign-made drones: a consensus. Reverdiau, the founder of Pilot Institute, which helps aviators obtain licences, said he reviewed over 3,800 comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission ...
What kind of population is Hong Kong planning for? That is the question the chief executive’s policy address must tackle as the Northern Metropolis begins to take shape. Much more than just another new town, the Northern Metropolis is Hong Kong’s most consequential project for its next phase of development, expected to house 2.5 million residents and provide 650,000 jobs. The numbers are well know...
Brazil on Wednesday eliminated its federal import tax on small overseas parcels, moving in the opposite direction from US and European Union efforts to close a loophole that saw such Chinese retail giants as Shein and Temu expand rapidly. The elimination will hurt the country’s tax base, but the levy on lower value shirts, electronics, toys and kitchen gadgets ultimately proved too unpopular among...
The creators of the long-running and enthusiastically insolent television show South Park aren’t known to be huge fans of US President Donald Trump. However, they’ve decided to adopt one of his ideas – in a way. They’re changing – at least for the moment – the name of the popular series, which just won the Emmy for outstanding animated programme. In a statement posted on the show’s social media pa...
Ukraine and Moldova on Wednesday played down claims from Norway’s prime minister that a plane carrying President Volodymyr Zelensky was almost hit by a drone as it flew to Oslo. Jonas Gahr Store told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that Zelensky’s plane was “almost hit by a drone when it was taking off from Moldova”. But a source in the Ukrainian presidency described the claim that Zelensky was a...
The plane carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Oslo for the funeral of the king of Norway was nearly struck by a drone when taking off from Moldova on Tuesday, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told public broadcaster NRK on Wednesday. “His plane was almost hit by a drone as it was about to take off from Moldova. That is the reality he is facing,” said Stoere, who did not...
US President Donald Trump said he expected the war with Iran to end after the November US midterm elections and threatened again to attack a site associated with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme after the two sides launched their biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the start of the six-month-old war. Tensions in the region were high, with Saudi civil defence authorities on Thursday i...
US President Donald Trump said he expected the war with Iran to end after the November US midterm elections and threatened again to attack a site associated with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme after the two sides launched their biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the start of the six-month-old war. Tensions in the region were high, with Saudi civil defence authorities on Thursday i...
US President Donald Trump said he expected the war with Iran to end after the November US midterm elections and threatened again to attack a site associated with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme after the two sides launched their biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the start of the six-month-old war. Tensions in the region were high, with Saudi civil defence authorities on Thursday i...
President Donald Trump on Wednesday predicted that the war with Iran will end “immediately after” the US midterm elections in November because Tehran was trying to influence the vote but would not be able to hold out more in the face of US economic pressure. “I think war is going to end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer. They’re desperate to try and affect th...
The UN atomic watchdog’s board on Wednesday reported Iran to the UN Security Council for the first time in 20 years, citing it for failure to cooperate in a long-running investigation into uranium traces detected by inspectors at undeclared sites. Western officials suspect that the traces could provide evidence that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons programme until 2003. Iran says that it is not p...
The UN atomic watchdog’s board on Wednesday reported Iran to the UN Security Council for the first time in 20 years, citing it for failure to cooperate in a long-running investigation into uranium traces detected by inspectors at undeclared sites. Western officials suspect that the traces could provide evidence that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons programme until 2003. Iran says that it is not p...
US President Donald Trump gave tens of thousands of dollars in cash gifts last year to executive assistant Natalie Harp and three other close aides working in the West Wing, according to financial disclosures released by the White House. The payments raised ethics concerns because federal employees are generally barred by statute from receiving compensation beyond their government salaries. Harp,...
An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement. Jacob Coxon, 27, spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approa...
Hong Kong is mourning the death of Tung Chee-hwa, the city’s first leader after its return to Chinese sovereignty and a respected elder statesman, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89. Tung was surrounded by his family when he “passed away peacefully” at 9.57pm, according to state news agency Xinhua. Tributes and messages of grief poured in on Wednesday from across Hong Kong and mainland China, as...
British police said on Wednesday a criminal investigation into the populist Reform UK party would be widened to include allegations made in a documentary that officials planned to break electoral law on foreign funding. Reform, led by veteran Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, denied any wrongdoing and a spokesman for the party said it would “fully cooperate” with the investigation. Farage, under in...
Indonesia is facing a surge in emissions from wildfires burning through parched stretches of forest and peatland on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, with carbon dioxide readings currently the highest in the world, data has shown. Fire emissions from Indonesia from September 1 to September 7 reached 19.7 million metric tons, overtaking Russia this week and making up more than a third of the glob...
Hong Kong’s first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, who died on Tuesday, has been lauded as “one of the greatest movers in China-US relations”, with a foundation established by a former American president’s family praising his “profound contributions” to deepening ties between the two nations. The US consulate and former city leader Donald Tsang Yam-kuen also praised Tung’s work in strengthening tie...
The risk of a conflict over Taiwan is shaping Japanese defence planning, with Tokyo shoring up security at home and abroad for a potentially prolonged fight. But there are economic, demographic and political constraints on how far its military transformation can go. In the third of a three-part series, Gabriel Dominguez examines the various challenges confronting Japan in its bid to expand its mil...
An explosion at an arms depot in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province killed 14 people on Wednesday, the local health department said, without specifying the cause of the blast. “The toll from the explosion in a temporary storage for collecting weapons and war remnants near the city of Sarmada ... registered 14 killed and 11 injured in a preliminary count,” the Idlib health department said. The Syr...
Singapore’s DBS Bank is being sued for an estimated S$1.298 billion (US$1.03 billion) in damages linked to the multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal, Southeast Asia’s largest lender DBS Group has said. The claimants include the liquidators of four companies: Blackrock Commodities (Global), Platinum Global Luxury Services, Affinity Equity International Partners and TKIL Global Investments. The liquida...
A year after China unveiled the world’s first operational air-breathing hypersonic missiles, the United States is launching a programme to double down on developing similar weapons. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) will bring contractors together later this month to lay out what it wants from the Next Generation Hypersonic Cruise Missile, with air-breathing propulsion at th...
European cities will gain more leeway to curb short-term rentals such as Airbnb under new EU plans that aim to bring down housing costs in tourism hotspots. The European Commission laid out conditions on Wednesday under which local authorities can limit short lets, under a proposal seeking to address Europe’s “housing crisis”. “Short-term rentals are a part of the problem in many cities,” Dan Jorg...
The death toll from measles in Bangladesh topped 1,000 children since March, health officials said on Wednesday, admitting that failures in a vaccination drive could have fuelled the outbreak. The South Asian nation of 170 million has recorded 1,002 deaths and 187,484 infections among children, making this year’s outbreak the country’s deadliest in decades, according to the Directorate General of ...
Hong Kong’s Buildings Department has filed 259 charges against two companies and four individuals over major renovation works at the inferno-ravaged Wang Fuk Court, after investigations found non-fire-retardant materials were used and safety obligations were not met. The department said on Wednesday that the charges included allegedly permitting or authorising the use of substandard materials or m...
